US holiday 2007: Disney's PhotoPass service
This is part of a series of blog entries that I'm gradually putting together about the holiday we just finished in Florida.
In previous visits to the Disney parks, we've made a point of getting our photo taken in front of the Tower of Terror. We've then purchased a print of the photo, and Disney have overlayed Mickey & Co standing in front of us. It has been a great way to remember the holiday, and to see the effect of the passage of time on my wife's sons as they grow older.
No longer, though, as that particular service has been replaced by PhotoPass. New to us, but not to more regular visitors to the parks, the service allows the Disney photographers to use digital cameras and assign a reference number to the photos. You then get given a card with that number on. Subsequent photos can be assigned the same reference, or you can get given a new card and then merge the accounts online.
I'd done some reading about this service ahead of us flying out to Orlando and I knew that our stay at the Beach Club Resort would include a free voucher for a 5"x7" print of a PhotoPass photo. So, we thought we'd try to make the most of the service and get photos of both of us that we could then enjoy afterwards.
As I've already mentioned, there is an online component to this service. It allows you to review the photos for up to 30 days after they were taken. You can also make some editorial changes to the photos, such as cropping, zooming in, rotating and adding "borders". The borders are the PhotoPass equivalent to what Disney used to do to the photos, i.e. they are overlayed graphics. Unfortunately, there wasn't the equivalent of the overlay that they used to apply.
The system is intelligent in that it has a set of categories for the photos. What I mean by that is that if you are looking at a photo of Winnie the Pooh, one of the borders will be Pooh's signature. Also, if the photo was taken in Epcot, one of the borders will be the 2007 logo for Epcot - the same goes for the other parks.
The online service does not allow you to save the images. The intention is that you order them, either as prints, or on a CD, in a book or as part of a video. To give you a flavour of the borders, though, here is the thumbnail of one of the photos that was taken:
and here are the various borders applied to this image:
Click on each image to see it slightly larger ... although not much larger!
I mentioned the CD of images - this is quite an expensive option, running at about $120 USD, but it can store all of the photos taken, plus any that you have manipulated or added borders to. We ended up having about 60-70 photos taken over the five days we were in the parks. When we got home, I went through most of them, adding all of the four possible borders for each photo, taking the total up to about 320 photos. That brought the cost per photo right down and makes it a more reasonable proposition. The images on the CD are supposed to be full quality and include a licence for you to use them images for personal use, which I think is good considering you can overlay Disney copyright logos onto them.
If you want the prints or other items while you are in the parks, there are photo stores that you can visit. The terminals there are operated by the Disney photographers which leads to quite a queue building sometimes. The facilities on the terminals are greater than what you can achieve online. The online service enforces where the border goes, while the terminals allow you to reposition and resize the graphics.
A major downside of the terminals is that they cannot access any of the images that you've created online. This meant that the only way I could order a Photo CD with my additional border-enhanced photos was online, rather than in the store.
A big plus of the service, although we only encountered it at Test Track, was that the cameras on the rides are linked into the PhotoPass system so you can have those photos added to your collection. One ride that we explicitly did not find this on was Expedition: Everest. I find it a bit strange that the newest ride isn't hooked into the system and it was a bit disappointing.
So we've ordered the Photo CD and it is on its way. Once it arrives, I'll write a followup piece on the quality of the images and the overall product.
